Fellow Digital Medievalists,

I recently created Old English and Old Norse custom keyboard layouts for Windows intended to be simple for those familiar with the standard US English keyboard layout. These keyboard layouts are ready to use and easy to install. Please read more and download them here:

http://megse.unm.edu/research/internal/keyboards.html

Also, feel free to distribute them among your colleagues and students (but please credit me and the UNM Medieval Graduate Students in English website).

I have also linked to Daniel O’Donnell’s custom keyboard solution for Linux.

There certainly are many ways to insert the special characters of our field into documents, and my Old English and Old Norse layouts are just another method. With that in mind, Dan and I have been talking about custom keyboards for medievalists and think it would be a good idea to design a standardized layout. Through the semester, we will be working on some aspects of the design, such as which characters should be included, how they should be mapped to the keyboard, and whether it is preferable to create one layout for medievalists or separate keyboards for sub-fields. We would very much like to hear your feedback on this project, both now and as it develops, as we hope the final product will be something agreeable and useful to the digital medievalist community.

Douglas Ryan VanBenthuysen

The University of New Mexico